Oakland’s Communist Mayor

“We must develop instead a new world order in which the United Nations, regional organizations,constructive diplomacy and equitable development policies lead to a reduction of the economic,social, cultural and political tensions that foster these spasms of violence and human rights abuse…..

“If the new world order is to move us past nationalism, then even the proprietor of the world’s most powerful military force must be prepared to conform to a perhaps laboriously created international consensus……

“Progressives have an opportunity to enter this debate and to convince our families, colleagues and neighbors that we need not fear and have much to gain by taking such a course.”

Ronald Dellums was born in Oakland, California on November 24, 1935. Unable to find a job after finishing high school, he enlisted in the Marines in 1954 and spent two years on active duty. Following his discharge in 1956, he entered college under the GI bill, graduated with a BA degree from San Francisco State College in 1960, then earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of California-Berkeley and became a psychiatric social worker in the California Department of Mental Hygiene. He worked at sundry other jobs in the fields of social work and community organizing prior to his 1967 election to the Berkeley City Council with the support of a coalition of students and black militants.

On February 17, 1968, Dellums delivered the keynote address at a birthday party for Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton, who had been convicted of killing a policeman. The next year, 348 Panthers were arrested for such serious crimes as murder, armed robbery, rape, bank robbery, and burglary. Party leaders openly called for the assassination of President Richard Nixon, and the FBI determined the Panthers to be “the most notorious and dangerous of current militant groups.” But the Panthers’ appalling record of violence did not cause Dellums to turn his back on them. During his 1970 campaign for Congress Dellums openly endorsed the Panthers.

In spite of his enthusiastic defense of the Panthers, Dellums was elected to Congress in 1970. In the primary, he upset 12-year veteran Congressman Jeffrey Cohelan, who himself had an impeccable left-wing voting record. When his primary victory was assured, he greeted his supporters with the customary communist clenched-fist salute. During his election campaign of 1970, Dellums held on to his regular supporters and also acquired new ones, including Communist Jessica Milford, Sargent Shriver of the Kennedy dynasty, and the AFL-CIO’s hatchet-crew, the Committee on Political Education (COPE). In the general election Dellums garnered 57 percent of the vote and has won reelection easily 13 times since.

His Part for “Peace”

From November 28-30, 1970 (after he was elected, but before he was sworn in), the World Peace Council(WPC) sponsored a World Conference on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in Stockholm, Sweden. Dellums addressed the opening session. The World Peace Council, spawned by the Soviet Union in 1950, was an important communist front, identified by the CIA, the FBI, and the State Department as controlled by Moscow. As Edward O’Mally, head of the FBI’s Intelligence Division, reminded a congressional committee in 1982, the “World Peace Council is, of course, the largest and most active Soviet-front organization with affiliates in approximately 135 countries. It is one of the major Soviet instruments for political action and propaganda in the peace movement”

Dellum’s began his first term so solidly with both left feet, that it caused Clay Claiborne, national director of the Black Silent Majority Committee, to issue a statement:

“Freshman Rep. Dellums, in Congress only five months, has managed to abuse and degrade his office in an incredible manner. Indeed, he has become the New Left’s version of Adam Clayton Powell.

“Dellums casts an injurious reflection on every other black office holder in the nation. America has been blessed with the election of thousands of outstanding black men and women, who serve with dignity as judges, attorney generals, sheriffs, state secretaries and in other high positions.”

In January 1971, only a few days after assuming his House seat, Representative Dellums organized a so-called “war crimes” exhibit in an annex of his congressional office. The atrocities, allegedly committed by U.S. soldiers, were featured on four large posters embellished with red paint to simulate blood. Needless to say, there was no suggestion that communist forces were engaging in terror and torture as policy. Dellums demanded Nuremberg-style trials only of U.S. officers responsible for supposed “war crimes.” A few weeks later he publicly discarded his military medals.

On May 5, 1971, with the United States still engaged in the Vietnam War, he spoke to demonstrators on the steps of the Capitol while standing under a Vietcong flag which someone had attached to the building’s balcony. And as related in the 1972 edition of Current Biography, he “began his own investigation of army conditions in the spring of 1971 by dropping in on short notice at military posts around the United States and speaking to rank-and-file soldiers, encouraging them to oppose the war in Vietnam….”

In 1973, Dellums was granted a seat on the House Armed Services Committee, placing him on a track that would lead to the chairmanship of that committee in 1993. At first, he was turned down in a secret ballot of the 18-member Democratic Committee on Committees. But with help from a few well-placed friends, he was eventually seated.

In 1975, Dellums was also appointed to the House Select Committee on Intelligence. In 1980, during an address to a Berkeley symposium, he declared, “We should totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, brick by brick, nail by nail.”

In 1978, Dellums and several of his fellow congressional leftists arranged to have a meeting of the WPC’s International Bureau held on Capitol Hill. Romesh Chandra, the WPC’s general secretary and member of the central committee of the Communist Party of India, was the main dignitary. Chandra subsequently returned for a meeting in the Rayburn House Office Building and a lunch in the House dining room with Dellums at his side.

In 1982, Dellums voted against the legislation that makes it a felony to publicly expose the identities of U.S. covert intelligence officers, agents, informants, and sources. There had been attempts by malevolent malcontents to undermine U.S. intelligence operations by publicly revealing information intended to enable our enemies to identify intelligence personnel and thus destroy their usefulness and endanger their lives.

Aiding Tyranny

Dellums has been affiliated with the ultra-leftist Soledad Brothers Defense Committee; the ultra-leftist National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; the ultra-leftist Community for New Politics in Berkeley; the ultra-leftist National Peace Action Coalition. He endorsed the Hanoi-inspired People’s Peace Treaty. Dellums was a founding member, along with labor-agitator Cesar Chavez, of the Tom Hayden and “Hanoi Jane” Fonda Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED). CED was funded with taxpayer money via VISTA grants to train “community” organizers, the New Left’s expansionist vehicle emanating from the teachings of Saul Alinsky, fund raiser for the Communists’ International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Alinsky has received the financial backing of leftist millionaire Marshall Field, Jr., and is the author of Reveille for Radicals.

In August 1977 the liberal publication Mother Jones reported that for “the first time in more than a century, a dues-paying socialist is also a member of the U.S. Congress. Congress member Ron Dellums, a California Democrat, has joined the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), the organization of socialists in the Democratic Party…”

On February 27, 1980, Dellums voted to give the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua $75 million in U.S. aid. That same month, Farid Handal, brother of the general secretary of the Communist Party of El Salvador, visited the United States as a representative of the Marxist-terrorist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) that was striving to seize power in El Salvador. As an expression of his adoration for the Sandinista regime, Dellums was a plaintiff in a lawsuit, filed by the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), to prohibit covert actions against the Sandinista communist regime.

Grenada Connection

In 1983, U.S. forces liberated Grenada from the grasp of Marxist-Leninist dictator Maurice Bishop’s New Jewel Movement after determining that a huge airport then under construction could handle the Soviet Union’s long-range bombers. Dellums denounced the action, claiming that the invasion was “nothing less than a crime against humanity, planned and executed by people who deserve to be condemned as war criminals.”

During the invasion, U.S. troops discovered tons of Grenadan documents confirming the communist nature of the Bishop regime. Included was correspondence with Dellums’ office. In 1982, Dellums had traveled to Grenada to, he said, get “an overview of the military questions and concerns of the United States as well as an objective assessment of factual information regarding Grenada and the building of the new international airport.”

A copy of the congressman’s report was found among the cache of documents found in Grenada, along with minutes of a New Jewel Movement Politburo meeting on December 15, 1982. At one point, the minutes assert: “Ron Dellums: His Assistant – Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the International Airport that was done by Ron Dellums. They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary – they will be willing to make the changes.”In other words, Dellums agreed to let the communist government of Grenada edit his report before he submitted it to the committee chairman.

U.S. forces also retrieved a letter sent to Bishop by Dellums aide Carlottia Scott. In the letter, Scott told the Grenadan communist dictator that the congressman:

“is really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn’t want anything to happen to building the Revolution and making it strong. He really admires you as a person and even more so as a leader with courage and foresight, principle and integrity. Believe me, he doesn’t make that kind of statement often about anyone. That only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel [Castro].”

Anti-Defense Activist

Dellums has also introduced legislation to award benefits to veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (ALB). During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the Communist International (Comintern) moved to drive Spain into the Red orbit. The Soviets supplied the communist side and recruited soldiers from other countries, including the United States. Approximately 3,000 Americans “enlisted” for service with the Reds in Spain, 60 percent of whom (according to Communist Party, USA General Secretary Earl Browder) either were or had been active Communist Party members. The communists lost the war and the ALB was formally cited as “communist” by Attorney General Tom Clark in a letter to the federal Loyalty Review Board released April 27, 1949.

The ALB was a communist front intended to bolster the Red side of a conflict with a foreign nation, yet Ron Dellums wants its “veterans” to receive the same benefits as authentic veterans of our wars.

Another Dellums proposal would have established a “World Peace Tax Fund” to permit taxpayers “conscientiously opposed” to war to channel their federal tax payments into a special fund to be used for so-called “peace-related” activities. Among the handful of ultra-pacifist groups in support of a “peace” tax are the American Friends Service Committee and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, two groups which have long records of being in the vanguard of communist causes. In support of a weaker America, in 1983 Dellums published Defense Sense: The Search for a Rational Military Policy. Contributors included Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, founders of the Marxist think-tank, Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), and IPS fellow Michael Klare.

In his book, Rebuilding America, Gar Alperovitz, IPS Fellow, says:

“Ultimately we need a national health service in which doctors and all health workers are salaried employees and care is delivered in community-controlled HMO’s. The concept is embodied in at least one proposal before Congress – the Health Services Act, introduced by Congressman Ron Dellums of California.”

Alperovitz failed to mention or footnote that the Dellums bill was written by the IPS! Dellums bill, HR 3884, introduced in congress June 11, 1981, was first announced as a project of the marxist Institute for Policy Studies in 1976, and is virtually the “outline” for Hillary Rodham Clintons “National Health Care Plan”.

A New “Bully Pulpit”

Despite more than two decades of seniority, Ron Dellums has been one of the most ineffective and least influential legislators on Capitol Hill. Throughout his congressional career, he has worked to expand the size and oppressive impact of government, stifle America’s private sector, hamstring our defenses, and disarm American people as individuals. Upon acceding to the chairmanship of the powerful House Armed Services Committee in 1993, he said: “I have a bully pulpit, and I plan to use it.” That chairmanship was lost with the House Republican majority victory in 1994. Dellums, amazingly, is still the Ranking Minority Member of the House National Security Committee (formerly, the House Armed Services Committee).

Were he not a congressman, it is unlikely that he could not even receive a security clearance for defense purposes. Indeed, he would doubtless be deemed a security risk. Yet as a member of the House Armed Services Committee he has access to highly classified materials and wields great influence over our nation’s defense.